


A Fire That Knows Your Name

by stilitana



Category: Annihilation (2018), Annihilation - Fandom, The Southern Reach Trilogy - Jeff Vandermeer
Genre: Alien Biology, Body Horror, Complicated Relationships, Emetophobia, F/M, Forgiveness, Grief/Mourning, Identity Issues, Medical Inaccuracies, Mutation, Not A Fix-It, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Science Fiction, Self-Hatred, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-04-21
Packaged: 2019-04-05 15:03:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14046849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stilitana/pseuds/stilitana
Summary: Lena returns to that which she set fire to and fled.





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> This story is where my mind went after seeing Annihilation. It's my speculation on what kind of relationship Lena and Kane might develop after the events of the film. The books were great but won't be directly referenced here since I'm focusing on the movie ending.
> 
> Comments and critique are always much appreciated. I hope you enjoy.

Kane has not been himself lately. Kane is not himself as I knew him and I do not know how well I want to know this creature called Kane. Kane is a new self.

I think I’ve gone through several new selves.

I can’t be sure of anything so I don’t linger on the unknowns. I am a biologist. At one time I would have been disgusted by my own apathy, by my willful turning of a blind eye in the face of life’s complexities. The mystery now bores me. It’s grown stale. I’m tired of always picking at threads and then being left with nothing when I’ve unspooled the world.

Whatever Kane is, it’s solid. I can work with that.

Still, the scientist in me can’t be completely laid to rest, so I find myself idly studying him during the week and a half or so we've been here, taking notes in my mind. He has a rudimentary vocabulary and at times his pronunciation and syntax is odd, but he is almost always comprehensible. I believe he shares many of my husband’s memories but they are fragmented and sometimes confuse him terribly so there is no knowing the breadth of them; maybe he keeps quiet when he doesn’t understand a recollection. Maybe he doubts them. I don’t have enough data. He seems to have some passive desire to be near me though his affect is rather flat so sometimes it’s difficult to gauge his emotions; despite his apparent albeit somewhat muted enjoyment of my company, he is very reticent. Shy, one could say. I’m not sure if he thinks I may do him harm. I will need to gain his confidence; I already have his trust, or so I think, given he walked through that place to find me, and is even more reclusive when I’m not around. Nobody else can get any more out of him.

I try not to feel smug about that. I can claim no real possession of this being, no matter whose face he wears.

I think he does not know who he is. It must be confusing, being the involuntary, accidental clone of a dead man who gave no directions other than to find me, and what a disappointment I’ve been; I haven’t any answers for him. He is a split, contradictory being. On the one hand I get the sense he has a very real idea of who Kane was, in a superficial sense at least, and what a human is. On the other hand he has undeniably alien characteristics. This might all be well and good, but it is apparent that the duality disturbs him.

It’s his self-repulsion I find most human. Had he shown no disgust for his existence I may not have had the strength to find the bitter kernel of empathy I’ve managed to dig up. I think he frightens himself. He doesn’t know even what he is, and no one can help.

Sometimes I am cruel with him. Sometimes I don’t realize I’ve been cruel until much later, when he does something to remind me he’s some significant percent human-like. Kane-like.

Though his vitals are stable and he is not, according to the team of specialists who daily studies him, contaminating any living matter around him, he continues to undergo occasional mutation. He reverts back to what I’ve come to think of as the default, that is, Kane, eventually, but it sometimes takes days. I have theories about this but it can’t be proven. They are based on my own experience with my double. Perhaps these doppelgangers undergo a kind of external gestation period where they learn not only the hardware; that is, the parent’s DNA sequencing, but the software too, that is, the cultural, social aspects of humanity. The language, the gestures, the expressions — all those little, crucial details. I think that Kane’s double spent enough time around the original to be able to survive their separation, but only just; he was not done gestating. And now he can never finish. He will always be a half-formed thing and his very genetic makeup rails against that, strives for change, completion, mastery. Utter subsumption of the parent, or model.

This is all speculative. All I know is what I observe.

Today what I hear when I knock on his door is shuffling and dry-heaving. This is not uncommon. We have small, separate bedrooms right next to each other. We are being quarantined. I am not so naive as to believe either of us will ever leave this place. I don’t care as much as I thought I would, as much as I would have before.

“Kane,” I say. I rap my knuckles sharply on the door. I don’t have much patience for him. “Open the door.”

Behind me stand two doctors. Their fields do not yet have names as they specialize in the very specific phenomenon that is Area X. Every morning we check on him. I insist on being present, and though at first they begrudged the intrusion, now they appreciate what little calming effect I have on him. What little control I command.

We hear a moan. More retching. “Now?” he calls. He sounds pitiful.

“Yes, right now,” I say. “It’s time for your check-up. Let’s see if we can help you.”

We hear the toilet flush and then the sink runs for a second. Good. That means he threw whatever it was up into the toilet, at least. It was larvae, once. He was pale and shocked to the point of paralysis all day. Stared at walls for hours, shaking, mumbling. Nothing consoled him.

He has a very insistent delusion that his insides are rotting.

I can’t blame him, given the things that sometimes come out of him.

Kane opens the door. I’ve tried to think up a new name for him but it was my husband’s last name anyway so it already feels impersonal enough. I don’t have the sensibilities for that kind of sentimentality. Until he indicates otherwise, I’ll call him Kane.

I entertained the notion of dubbing him Abel, but it was really the other way around, wasn’t it?

He’s glowing with sickness. Actually glowing a little, a greenish-white pallor. It looks ghastly. His hair is matted down with sweat and he won’t meet our eyes, just stands hunched in the doorway with his arms wrapped around his middle, wincing. He’s shivering.

“What’s the matter?” I say. The two doctors let me lead the introductions. They haven’t worked out how best to engage him.

Kane moves his head slowly back and forth like a blind cow. “Don’t feel good,” he mutters.

“I can tell that much,” I say. “What specifically.”

“Belly…’s moving.”

“Were you throwing up?” I asked.

He nods shamefacedly as if I’m going to scold him. I’m not, I never have. If he can feel my disgust, it’s nothing compared to his own, he’ll have to live with it. And mine diminishes all the time. More and more I pity, if I feel at all. Mostly I’m just null.

“Gasoline,” he mutters.

“What?”

“‘M throwing up g...gasoline,” he says, covering his mouth as he hiccups. His face blanches. I reach out and touch the sleeve on his shoulder just barely, with my fingertips, and he responds as though pushed, stumbling back into the room. I step inside and pick up the bucket that sits beside his twin bed. It’s a permanent fixture. I hand it to him.

Kane turns away and vomits, his shoulders shaking. I smell petrol.

The two doctors follow us. They wear hazmat suits and carry bags of instruments I don’t presume to know the exact function of.

“Kane,” I say. “Sit on the bed.”

Kane sits, which forces him to face us. God, he looks miserable. I step forward and peer into the bucket.

“Yes, that looks like gasoline alright.” I turn to the doctors. “Go on. I expect you’ll be wanting to study the invalid’s puke? I know that’s what really gets you guys going. Myself, I like a cup of coffee at least, before I’m elbows deep in vomit, but to each their own.”

One of them actually snorts and covers it with a cough. The other glares. She doesn’t appreciate my attitude but I feel somewhat entitled to it and I think most of the employees here agree as I am left mostly to my own devices, so long as I cooperate and help with Kane.

The woman’s name is Moira. The man is Dan. Dan the man. Dr. Dan. He’s the one that snorted.

Dan comes forward and sits on the chair beside Kane’s tiny desk and starts rooting through his bag. He pulls out a vial and takes a sample of the vomit. Kane whimpers. His skin is getting pebbly, breaking out in smooth, scaly bumps. This is not going to be one of his good days.

“Do something,” Moira mutters.

“Kane,” I snap. “Be good.”

Finally he looks up at me with baleful eyes. I see the iris is jagged, spindling out into the sclera like broken egg-yolks. “Lena,” he says, like it means something.

I sigh and sit on the bed beside him and keep a couple inches between us. I’d rather not; he smells like a petrol station. But there is an unspoken rule that I don’t get breakfast until Kane’s morning check-up is through. He’s dressed in socks, sweatpants, short-sleeved t-shirt over a long-sleeved undershirt. All grey cotton. Same as me.

“Kane,” I murmur, softening my voice. He and I have developed a primitive language with two primary words, our names, spoken with different inflections. “If you tell me and the doctors what’s happening, we might be able to help you feel better. No one’s angry with you. This has happened before. And didn’t everything turn out alright? Weren’t you alright afterwards, those other times?”

He nods. “I can feel things moving,” he whispers, and shudders. “I’m cold. I don’t know why.”

“Well, if you be good we’ll maybe get another step closer to knowing,” I say.

“Get him to lift up his shirt,” Moira says. She’s holding a sort of three-pronged stethoscope-like instrument with round metal ends that you just know will feel freezing against your skin. I sigh again. He is notoriously stubborn about staying covered up.

“Kane,” I say, cajoling. “Could you lift your shirt for just a minute, for Dr. Moira?”

He gives a reaction none of us are expecting given the shock on all our faces when he jerks back from me, panic on his face. “Don’t cut me,” he says. “Don’t cut me, Lena, don’t let them cut me open. It’s fine.”

I hold my palms out and cast a sharp glance at both doctors to stop them from getting too gung-ho with the sedatives.

I can’t stop my voice from being chilly when I say, “What made you think we’d do a thing like that?”

His eyes are wide and round like a cornered animal. He swallows. I don’t know why he thinks we’re going to punish him for this, but it seems he does. “I don’t know,” he says. It’s very obvious when he lies. He gets sulky.

My husband was a better liar, though still not a very good one.

“I think you do,” I say. “I think you know why.”

“I remember,” he says. “I remember me...him...inside was all wrong,” he says.

“He remembers Kane cutting open another crew member,” I tell the doctors. That video hasn’t been recovered, but I’d told them about it. They like to keep track of this sort of thing. It’s unclear right now by what mechanism he got memories, and whether he can access any more or if he’s stuck with half a jigsaw.

“No one’s cutting you,” I say. “You weren’t there, when that happened. Did Kane tell you, or do you remember? How do you know about that?”

He shrugs miserably. “I don’t know. Don’t be mad.”

“Alright, it’s fine. No one’s mad. Just please let the doctors examine you.”

He finally concedes, lying back and lifting his shirt up to his chest. The pale skin on his stomach is...softly, gently shifting. Something inside him is pressing faintly against the skin, moving.

It’s sickening.

It’s not the worst thing we’ve seen.

Moira presses the three prongs to his chest, then moves them down his stomach, listening, prodding.

“Mutation predominant in lower abdomen,” she says to Dan, who taps a note out on a tablet. “Does it hurt when I do this?” She asks, then presses down hard with the leftmost prong, over his appendix.

Kane somehow goes even more bloodless. He sucks in a breath and makes a choking sound, moans. He tries to curl in on himself but Moira presses down on his shoulder with her gloved hand. He responds like she’s shoved him. I think he did not learn much about physical contact from his originator.

“Yes,” he says, “that hurt.”

Moira retrieves a clear paste and hands it to me. “Smear this on his stomach,” she says. Next she takes out a wand attached to a handheld screen device, like a portable ultrasound with multiple dials and meters for measuring god knows what.

“This will probably feel cold,” I say to Kane. “But it won’t hurt.” I gingerly smear the paste onto him. I try to only use my fingertips.

Moira runs the wand over him, squints at her screen. “Stomach is epicenter of mutation. Characteristics inconclusive until further analysis of the sample. It appears engorged and noduled. These growths are producing a visible effect on exterior. Interior is inflamed. Mutated organ is putting pressure on the rest. Subjects malleable DNA may be forming new digestive tract though it does not perfectly mirror any found on earth in any one species. Concern about auto-cannibalism.”

“What?” I say, turning towards her. “He’s digesting himself?”

“It’s a potential risk,” says Moira. “We should keep him under observation today.”

Kane sits up and fumbles for the bucket before throwing up again.

“Does it hurt very much?” I ask.

My husband was a soldier. He had been stoic. This creature with its flat affect perhaps learned a thing or two about that from him but it doesn’t have the same ideas about masculinity to really enforce some kind of macho bravado. “Yes,” it says.

“You’ll give him something for that?” I say, spearing Moira with a cold gaze.

“The drug cocktail administered last time kept his vitals stable,” she says. “His life isn’t at risk, this is just the nature of what he’s made of, this mutation. It’s just a matter of symptom mitigation. Comfort.”

“And you will do that?”

I have plenty of reasons to suspect that they prioritize findings over Kane’s comfort, that what is considered permissible levels of pain and distress for him is far higher than what they’d accept in anyone else. I'm not sure I necessarily disagree. Only I am so tired and sick from all the grief and killing.

“We'll do what we can, but of course his anatomy is beyond us,” says Moira. That means science possesses him. I understand this. It has been this way always.

“Antihistamines…” Dan mutters for no clear reason, tapping away on the tablet.

I have breakfast by myself while they take Kane to the medical bay where he will lie on a cot with needles going in and out of him all day and people in masks standing over him. I’m not sure if this is more or less disturbing for a creature whose only other lived experience has been the Shimmer than it would be for you or I. Perhaps everything is alien to him.


	2. Two

When I first came back I thought I could pretend it was really Kane. I don’t know why I came back, if not for him. Even when I learned the truth, my choice was to die or carry on in my determination to return to him.

When they finished interogating me, at least for that night, and let me see him, we embraced. He was warm and solid. I wanted to be fooled.

I made them drag another cot for me into his room. Even though he’d stabilized they wanted to keep him there awhile longer. I told no one he was not the real thing, not at first. That explanation came only later when I couldn’t pretend anymore, when it became too obvious I was repulsed and he was something other than human. On the first night we were just a husband and wife, reunited.

When I kissed him he responded like he used to, and I try not to linger on what that means as far as which memories are knocking around in his head. But the gaps became glaring. He didn’t remember as much as I needed him to, for it to be convincing. We started fighting. (I started getting angry.)

I’d spend hours backing him into a corner, questioning him. _Where did we meet? What were you like as a child? Tell me again, that story about your mother and water skis. Tell me our favorite colors, takeout places, movies. What’s that one recurring dream you always have, again? How does the song go? The one we sang on the long drive home from some conference, sitting in traffic, in rain that thundered on the windshield. How do I like to be touched? How do_ you _ like to be touched? _

“I don't...gently?” he said. “I was in the military. You were in the military. I had a mother. She had dark hair. I was a child, once, I was...small, I didn’t know things. I’m not sure about favorites, you look nice in red.”

We were eating lunch in the mess hall. There were everpresent Area X workers loitering. It had been a whole, blissful day of pretending, but when I woke the world was gray and my husband was dead and I was asleep in a room with the thing that crawled out of some hole in the ground to replace him.

“What do you remember?” I said.

He paused, chewed his lip. “You...were having an affair,” he said.

I saw red. I saw myself from somewhere up above as I stood, lifted my glass, and flung it against the wall. It shattered into a spray of glittering shards and water went everywhere. “That’s what you remember?” I screamed. “That’s what you fucking remember? That’s it? Well you know what, Kane, you weren’t perfect, either!”

He sat still, tilted his head and stared up at me. It reminded me of my faceless double, the motion so uncanny and alien, so exagerated and watchful. I was sobbing. I saw him through tears that distorted his face terribly.

“Get away from me!” I shouted. “Get away! Get off, get it off, get it _off_ me!”

I couldn’t breathe. Suddenly I felt pressed between two boards, squeezing from my front and back, suffocating me. My double’s face crushing mine into the door, its entire hateful body pressed so close to mine there were no seams, bleeding together. I knew I would die. I was lightheaded. There was no help, there was only a bottomless chasm opening inside of me and sucking everything into it. I felt a hole open up at the top of my head. The world poured in and buried me.

They gave me a shot to calm me down and kept us separated.

They got a new psychologist. Her name is Wilks. That day I had to see her. She said things like panic attack and flashback and trauma response. I told her I didn’t need a degree in psychology to figure that much for myself.

“I know your husband’s amnesia is distressing,” she said. “But do you have any idea why it would trigger such a response?”

I barked out a laugh. It was an ugly sound. “That thing is not my husband, I swear to you. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not him. I fucking swear it. It’s another one of those things, some byproduct the Shimmer just threw up one day, for no reason.”

Wilks sighed. She straightened some papers on her desk, took a moment to think. “We know that’s not Kane,” she finally said.

It took a moment for her words to register. “Excuse me?”

“We know that’s not the same version of your husband that went into the Shimmer,” she said. “Please, try not to get worked up before I explain. We haven’t known for long, but it became obvious after testing that either he was so scrambled from the experience he should be dead, or he wasn’t himself. Not exactly. I can’t explain in depth, no one can, but you don’t need a degree in biology to know that much,” she said.

“Don’t make jokes,” I said, my voice strained and hoarse. I sounded like a corpse.

She nodded her head. “I’m sorry. I know this must be incredibly overwhelming. I advised the rest of the team, those who knew, not to say anything to you right away. I thought it would be too much. I was under the impression that returning to your husband was what got you out alive, what saved your sanity.”

“It did,” I said.

“Until it didn’t. Listen. Whatever else goes on around here, an important part of my job is keeping you steady. I see I’ve failed in that, and I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. A lot of other things have had a go at me before you got here,” I said.

She smiled. She was around Ventress’s age. I thought I would have been able to like her, had we met before.

I didn’t see Kane for the rest of the day, or the next. Then Wilks and the associate director, an older Filipino man with a kind but secretive face who everyone called Max, called me in. I never saw the new director. Never learned his name, either. When people talked about him they just called him Control and I guess he had bigger things to deal with than the collateral damage of past missions.

Wilks sat across from me at her desk. Max stood.

“Lena,” said Wilks, “we’re having problems with Kane.”

I just stared at her.

“He’s been having some...medical troubles, to my understanding,” she said. “I don’t know as much about that other than it’s been...extremely distressing. What I do know is that they’ve had to sedate him twice in the past twenty-four hours. They’ve been sending him to me, but there’s only so much I can do. The way he thinks is...I haven’t spent enough time with him yet to be of much help to him.”

“I’m sure this is all very fascinating to you,” I said. I’d spent most of the last twenty-four hours in bed, staring at a wall, thinking absolutely nothing, a perfect empty tundra between my ears.

“Lena,” said Max. He was softspoken but his voice had a sort of resonance that made you take notice. “He asks for you constantly.”

I stared him down. Neither of us wavered. 

"He thinks he's hurt you," Wilks said. "That's very upsetting to him."

“He’s not my husband,” I said. They had the decency not to react when my voice cracked. “I wish that I could go back and keep pretending otherwise. But I can’t. Every time I look at him, I — you don’t know, the things you see in there. The things you do.”

“For that we have Dr. Wilks,” said Max. “You will start seeing her. You will take her advice, and if she recommends medication, you will seriously consider it.”

I understood that there would be no argument. They hold my life in their hands. I am dead to the world, exist only in the limbo that is Area X. I chose this, when I rejected my annihilation. It is really all the same, in the end.

“You want me to talk to him,” I said.

Max nodded. “You and he are important to our ongoing efforts. This is bigger than us, Lena. You know that better than anyone. Whether you still feel you have a stake in humanity or not is, frankly, not my concern. I do. I would like you to make the efforts you feel capable of in regards to Kane. I don’t ask you to be a wife to him. I don’t think he asks that, either, or that he’d even know how. I simply ask for your cooperation. If you give us that, things will go very smoothly for everyone.”

“I want my own room,” I said.

“Of course,” he said.

“But...but make them close. His and mine.”

“I’d prefer it that way as well.”

“I want access to lab equipment. I’d like to run my own tests.”

“I can’t grant access to every research project going on in the facility, but if you wish to become a formal part of the research team, perhaps we can renegotiate in time.”

“Maybe. All I’m asking for now is the basics.”

“Done.”

I was led by Moira and Dan to the medbay. Inside Kane was sitting on a cot and staring at the wall.

“He can go hours like that,” Dan said. “It’s like there’s nobody home up there sometimes.”

Moira glared at him.

I stood in the doorway. “Kane,” I said.

He turned his head to look at me. For a long time he just stared, devouring me with his eyes. Perfectly blank, empty eyes. Then he said, “I was supposed to find you. I was supposed to protect you.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t know how.”

“That’s ok. I can look out for myself.”

“Was it was bad for you, in there?” he said, with great effort, as though he’d struggled to arrive at this question. 

“We’re both out now, it’s over.”

“It hurt you, in there? You weren’t safe? They say it was bad for you, in the Shimmer, and that’s why you got upset.”

I tried to imagine what logic he was using, how his train of thought ran. “It was bad for everybody in the Shimmer. You didn’t hurt me, the other day, if that’s what you’re wondering. Or at least, not on purpose. Sometimes you remind me of things that happened in there. To him, and to me, and to others.”

“I hurt you,” he muttered. “It hurts you to be around me. I was told to protect you.”

“It’s the Shimmer that did it,” I said. I didn’t bother putting any feeling into my voice. I hadn’t any, and no matter what backwards threats Area X employed, I wouldn’t be cowed into playing emotional support for him.

He shook his head. “The Shimmer changes things,” he said. “It rearranges. It doesn’t hurt you.”

“You and I have different ideas of harm,” I said. “What would you know? How could you know?” I didn’t want to argue. I was verging on agreement with him, had been since I entered that place. I thought about Josie, I thought about Ventress. About submission.

“Not on purpose,” he whispered. “It doesn’t hurt on purpose. Not like people do.”

“Yes,” I said. “A malignant tumor never has it out for you quite like people do. It’s not cruelty, unless God’s up there planting cancer in our cells.”

“God isn’t malicious,” he said, with surprising force.

“I didn’t come here to talk theology and morals with you,” I said. “It’s too late for those conversations.”

“Do you want to play rummy instead?” he asked. “Those doctors, they gave me playing cards.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want to do anything.”

“Me, neither.”

We sat on the floor and played rummy all afternoon and then we had dinner. Since then I’ve stayed true to our tense truce. There’s no one else in this place who understands either of us better than the other, there is no other company to be had for either of us in this world.


	3. Chapter 3

At night I go visit Kane in the medical bay where he is eating applesauce and talking to Dan, who’s looking back and forth between a tablet in his hands and the display on the machine Kane’s hooked up to. 

“If you’re well enough to eat, it must be getting better,” I say.

Kane smiles when he sees me, as much as he ever smiles. “I’m a lot better.”

“The mutation started reverting a couple hours ago and now it’s just sort’ve hovering,” Dan says. “I told him to take it easy with the food for a while.”

“Kane wouldn’t take it easy on food if his life depended on it,” I say.

I wait to be contradicted but Kane just grins, shrugs, shovels more applesauce into his mouth. 

“I’m seeing potential hormonal irregularities,” Dan frets.

Kane groans. “Don’t say anymore. Just let me stay ignorant. I don’t want to always know what you’re seeing, ok?”

“Ok, if that’s how you want it,” Dan says.

“Hey Dan, why don’t you get us some more food?” I ask. “I heard there’s mashed sweet potatoes in the mess hall.”

There’s no official reason Dan should take orders from me, or even polite suggestions, but he’s a nice guy, works too closely with us to be rude when Moira does that for him, and he’s probably hungry anyway. Plus now Kane’s looking at him like his good health depends on more food.

Dan huffs. “I’ll be right back. Don’t mess with any of my stuff.”

He leaves. They’ve been giving us more freedoms as time goes on. And by more freedoms I mean they let us stay in a room alone together like this when there are doctors out in the hall and a camera on the ceiling.

“I’m glad you feel better,” I say.

“Me too. Do you want to go swimming tomorrow?”

I blink, speechless for a second. “Where would we go swimming?”

He scrunches his face up just like he used to when he was confused, when he thought I was being silly. “The pool?”

“What pool?”

“The...the pool here? The one in this building? I hope I’m not making this up, but, shit, I remember there being a pool. They had it for training...we had to swim laps with our bags on.”

It’s uncanny when he curses. He’s in a mood tonight, no doubt about it. I’m too numb to really enjoy how much like himself he sounds.

“Guess I lucked out, I didn’t have to do anything like that.”

“Well, you’re a scientist. What did the rest of us soldier boys have going for us?”

“An ok personality?”

He laughs. I hope Dan hurries up with the food so he’ll go back to stuffing himself. I’m not sure how much more of his good mood I can take.

“How long were you with Kane?” I ask.

He stops laughing and gets somber. “I don’t know. Not long enough.”

I’m teetering in the edge, about to plunge over into the conversation I need to have about doubles, about how Kane acted towards his, how he felt, what it was like staying with that thing. I need to confess. 

An alarm starts sounding in some further reach of the facility. Both of us freeze and turn toward the direction of the noise. The scientists and doctors in the hall know what this is about; they run off in different directions or else stay at their stations as if given predetermined instructions. A second too late I lunge for the door but as my fingers close around the handle I hear the lock click. I tug it anyway. 

I feel the walls closing in on me. My throat constricts. I bash my side against the door again and again. I imagine water filling the room, I see monsters or men with machine guns storming the facility, I am gripped by rows of teeth and altogether too many fingers.

“Lena,” says Kane, and grabs me around my middle, hauls me away from the door.

I round on him, twist away and punch him hard in the shoulder before I know what I’m doing. He stumbles back and presses against the far wall, IV needle dangling uselessly from his arm, trailing tubes from his fingers. I think, _he needs a haircut._

The suddenness of the thought jars me from my panic. “I’m sorry,” I say. 

He nods jerkily, forcing me to wonder if he knows why I’ve apologized.

“This happened before,” he says. “The alarm, while you were inside. I can’t be sure why. I think it means something’s come out.”

“Come out? Of the Shimmer?”

He nods. “But we can’t know. They won’t tell you straight out. But if you watch them closely, sometimes you can guess things.”

I slide along the glass and sit on the floor. Across from me he does the same, holding my gaze all the while. It takes me a moment to notice why the action is uncanny; he’s bracing himself against the glace with his right hand, sliding it down, holding himself in the exact same way as me, sitting in the same knees-to-chest position. And our clothes. The same grey cotton. I wish they’d get us different clothes.

“Why do you do that?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says. 

It’s not the first time I’ve caught him mirroring. He usually stops as soon as I point it out, as though he hasn’t noticed. I doubt it’s out of courtesy.

"Can you help it? Is it on purpose?"

He shrugs. I think he's taking advantage of my by now very low expectations of what he does and does not know. A shrug might very well mean he just doesn't want to tell me.

“You wanted to know,” he says, “about him and me.”

I nod.

“We were relieved,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“When he saw that I was him he said, thank God, you’re just in time. A second later and I’d have lost it for sure.”

“What was he talking about?”

Kane doesn’t have trouble holding eye contact. He can stare placidly through you forever with a look either peaceful or numb, I can’t tell. “He was all alone,” says Kane. “He said I was lucky, I’d never had to be. He said sorry, eventually, when he made me be. He taught me things. He talked to me. It was like a game. He was...kind, and slow...I mean patient, not slow.”

“What kind of things did he teach you?”   


Kane sighs and looks up over my head. “To speak...to move...to be?”

“I thought you learned by observation. By mimicking.”

“I did. But. He helped it along. He made it easier. He taught me to play cards...we played lots of rummy, and war, and poker, but he always knew when I was bluffing. It made him laugh. He said it was because he knew what he looked like when he was lying but I didn’t yet.  Also how to shoot. And…”

He makes a funny expression I’ve not seen for so long it takes me a moment to realize he's blushing. “Go on,” I say.

He brings a hand up to his face. “To shave,” he says.

My breath catches in my throat. A thousand memories of Kane pulling the skin on his cheek or neck taut flash through my mind, a thousand razors rasped against stubble.

“Tell me something only Kane would know,” I say.

He meets my eyes again with a stricken look. He thinks for a long moment and then shrugs helplessly. “There’s nothing only Kane knows anymore,” he says.

“What are you talking about?”   


“Either we both knew it, or...or I didn’t learn in time, and now it’s gone.”

“What are you?” I snap. “Are you him, or not? Are you Kane?”

“I don’t know,” he says. He's starting to look miserable. I don’t care. 

“Do you think of yourself as Kane?” I'm not going to let up until he gives me some answers.

“I try not to think of myself,” he says. “I don’t know, Lena. It makes me...I...you couldn’t guess, how it makes you feel, just sick, and confused.”

“I don’t have to guess,” I say, gripping the fabric of my pants, glaring at him. “I had one of them.”

His eyes widen. “You...had a double?”

I regret telling him almost immediately. It had been my secret. She was mine, nobody else's. But it's too late, so I just nod.

“What happened to her?”

I stare him down. “What do you think happened?”

Grief. That is grief on his face, undeniably. I want to smack it right off. What did he know? What right did he have, to feel something like that, to feel anything at all over that thing? It was mine.

“She didn’t make it,” I say.

“I know,” he says.

“I killed her, the way Kane killed himself.”

“Oh.”

“And I watched her die. Like you watched my husband die. You just stood there and fucking watched.”

He flinches when I raise my voice and that just makes me angrier. “What bullshit, you sitting there and telling me how good and gentle he was with you. Well, if you loved him so much, why did you just watch?”

“I don’t know,” he mumbles. “I don’t—Lena, please, I...I didn’t know. I didn’t know what was happening, not really, I didn’t understand, I still don’t understand, I can’t think,” he says, gripping his head and squeezing his eyes shut. “I can’t think, ok? It’s...it’s all mixed up, I can’t put it together, nothing makes sense, I just want someone to tell me what to do!”

“Well, tough luck! Kane’s gone! He’s not coming back, he can’t tell you how to be him anymore, you’ll have to figure it out yourself.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry, Lena, I’m trying. I’m trying to be like him.”

“Well, you’re doing a terrible job! Kane would be yelling by now, Kane would be angry. Can you even get angry? Can you feel anything, or is it all a performance, are you just acting?”

“I can, I can feel things,” he says, pleading. “Kane did yell a lot, but, but it wasn’t really at me, it was...he was breaking, it wasn’t because he was mad. I don’t want to yell at you like that, Lena.”

“Then what good are you?” I say.

Fights were how Kane and I let off steam. It was hardly ever just about what triggered the argument, which was almost always something small and meaningless. Afterwards it was like the reset button had been hit and we could both move on. I'm not sure how else to get all of the feeling out, the impulse to break things.

We sit in silence for a while. Then he whispers, “I want you to like me, Lena. What do I have to do? I’m...alone, Lena.”

I stare at him, unable to hide the hatred that suddenly wells up in me. I don't know where it comes from. I didn't lose control like this, before. “It doesn’t matter if I like you,” I say, my voice cold. “That doesn’t matter at all. That’s not the kind of thing you get to want, to expect. But you don’t have to worry. You’re not alone. We’re stuck together.”

I don’t see how that will ever change. One way or another, we're trapped in the same labyrinth.


End file.
